It's becoming increasingly difficult. Data leaks, address and name leaks and chain analysis have made it easier to track who owns what. If crime agencies are able to track wallets down then criminals are too.

Maybe if your money is not on a public blockchain you don't have to worry about chain analysis.

Only the your onramp/offramp would need to know who you are (because of KYC/AML), otherwise you can be as anonymous as you want and it really isn't hard, assuming you don't want to hide from your onramp/offramp.

Unless of course you want to use your hard earned crypto to buy tangible things over the Internet.

Why unless? Say you have 1 ETH in Wallet A, if you transfer it to your on/offramp (the exchange) and then do Wallet B, the only link between Wallet A and B is only known by the exchange, so you'll remain private (publicly, again assuming you don't want to hide from the exchange).

You can't trust the exchange to not inadvertently leak the information. A substantial leak could include personally identifying information along with account balances and or deposit and withdrawal totals.

Somewhere along to lines, if you want USD, you need to trust someone, it's inescapable. So once you know this, you can act accordingly.

But still, the original argument was that you have to worry about chain analysis because everything is public, but obviously that isn't true, no matter if an exchange may or maybe not inadvertently leak something.

Onramps/offramps generally generate individual wallets per user to send/receive from, so it still goes back to you at the end of the day.

They either generate wallet address dynamically, and in those cases allow you to regenerate one at will.

Or, they have wallets that acts as combined input/output for all/groups of users.

I don't know a single big exchange that generates exactly one wallet per user and uses that one always for the same user.

When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense they do it like that.

First one maybe but definitely not the second one. Have you actually thought of it? How would the platform know who sent what. They can't. So it's definitely not shared on the deposit side. And I doubt they'd move the money around because of fees so I doubt it's shared on the withdrawal side too. From my experience, of course it depends on the blockchain used, but they all have static addresses per user

Addresses, sure, but not wallets.

I mean, that, or keep your money in a bank or brokerage. But yeah, I guess if you're not going to do that, git gud at opsec.

This is the way.

A friend of mine became insanely wealthy just off of Bitcoin. Immediately went off the grid a few years (back in 2017). Now owns a precious metals mining company in South America. Still holds Bitcoin, lives comfortably to a point, changed passports to evade sanctions (he was Russian), and even has a kind of his own private army, that's mostly involved in the mining business.

You wouldn't figure all of that out by simply looking at him, but strike him now and you'd have to contend against a few major governments at this point.

Yes private armies are VERY SECURE.

Well it's practically a security corporation that has contracts with a major US ally. Their work is mostly for that government.

But yeah, he basically lives like a dead man.